“Two Weeks.” I have visions of the huge and tall person in the movie Total Recall when the head explodes while going through customs. I decided to do a portrait, of course, I wanted to challenge myself because I thought I needed the practice. Finishing it in two weeks was a joke! For what it is worth, I just finished it. Remember, that always comes with the caveat of “I’m going to futz with it for a while longer until I’m satisfied…”
(more…)Archive for February, 2020
Advanced Painting Atelier Week 10 & 11 Split-Complimentary Color Figure Painting
Sunday, February 23rd, 2020Advanced Painting Atelier Weeks 8 & 9 Trompe l’Oeil
Tuesday, February 18th, 2020This time, we had two weeks to complete a painting. Rose wanted us to do a Trompe l’Oeil, which is a painting that gives the illusion of reality, such as a painting of a window onto a lush tropical landscape that is painted directly on a wall. In this case, I painted a tree frog on a flower coming out of a hole in the wall.
I had an old canvas that I had primed with leftover dark colors, and I decided to use that. The colored tree frog on the blossom I cut out so that I could see how it would look as part of the painting. I probably took the most amount of time deciding how to shape the window, what type of border to use, and finally, how thick to make the border. After I made those decisions, I had to move the whole thing.
Here is the final. Everyone thinks he is incredibly cute!
Advanced Painting Atelier Weeks 5 – 7 Master Copy
Saturday, February 15th, 2020The next thing we had to do for our Advanced painting class was to do a copy of a Master Painting. I chose Miranda from “The Tempest” painted by John William Waterhouse.
I chose this painting because I thought I needed to practice putting my subjects firmly in a background. Most of my paintings are portraits, not complete paintings with a foreground, middle ground, and a background. The first thing I did was to crop the painting because I only had three weeks to complete it.
Here’s a picture of my cropped image and the beginning of my underpainting. The finished size will be 12 x 16.
Here it is much further along.
Here’s my final. It needed a lot more work and this was what I could finish in three weeks. I learned a lot. You can absolutely learn to paint like another artist. I spent a lot of time figuring out how Waterhouse created his brush strokes, how he layered paint to get effects or certain colors. I figured out that he drew/painted the figure without the dress first, I could tell by the shape of the legs under the skirts. A lot of what he paints is very loose, and that is difficult to copy. This needed probably about another 15 hours for me to be happy with it. It turned out to be a great learning experience.